Reported is an investigation of the development of children's thinking in relation to biological education, involving over 200 twelve-year-old students from five comprehensive British schools. While the students' ability to name animals was considered "good," they had trouble recognizing drawings of plants and their understanding of…

Discusses the value of elementary science in promoting both cognitive and affective growth in children. (JR)

Discusses some of the problems, theories and methods involved in helping poor and minority group children progress to higher levels of educational achievement and makes several concrete suggestions to this end. (SF)

This paper examines the effects of unavoidable pollutants on fetal development in humans. Inevitable pollutants such as radiation, pesticides, gases and lead found in the air, water, and food of our industrialized society are discussed as well as psychological correlates of industrialization and urbanization such as stress, increased noise levels…

The study reported in this paper traces the nature of the changes which take place as the child gradually acquires perspective-taking skills. The results indicate that at first the young child can correctly represent only the location of the object nearest another observer; later, he can correctly represent a before-behind relationship between…

This study manipulated the relations between target and cue words in two cued-recall experiments with children based on the assumptions that: (1) the target cue relations that are most consistent with a child's semantic memory organization result in the highest levels of recall, and that (2) the optimal target-cue relationships may change with…

This document reorts on an educational research study involving 75 eighth-grade students to determine the effects of problem solving instruction on the ability of students to apply proportional reasoning in problem situations. Results suggest that changes in basic reasoning skills such as proportional reasoning are long term, highly dependent on…

This paper describes two studies which investigated the development in elementary school children of the ability to derive inferences about the subjective states (physiological and psychological) of others. A cued recall procedure was utilized to assess the relative effectiveness of implicitly or explicitly stated emotional states as cues for…

The effectiveness of audiotutorial and teacher-directed inquiry in promoting school achievement was explored. High school biology students from two dissimilar populations were administered ten Piagetian-styled tasks to determine the student's operational level. Analysis of data on operational level and age determined that inner-city students…

This study examined the relationships between cognitive development, language acquisition, and socioeconomic class, as manifested in children's written language. Four classes of sixth-grade students participated in the investigation, a control class and an experimental class from each of two socioeconomic environments (low and high). The treatment…

The study compared the level of development observed in the imaginative play of young children with the level of development revealed in conservation an classification tasks. The sample included 40 children, with one 5/6-year old group of 20 children (10 boys, 10 girls), and two six/seven-year old groups of 20 children (14 boys, 6 girls). The…

It was hypothesized that children, like adults, cognize social groups by applying social schemata. Their facility with social schemata was predicted to be a function of their level of cognitive development. When children were asked to complete partial social structures, formal and concrete operational, but not preoperational children, readily…

The conference papers in this collection emphasize the theoretical significance of their authors' work in the areas of mathematical and cognitive psychology. Major topics considered include facilitation of problem solving; psychological differences among problem isomorphs; the process of understanding in problem solving; processing information for…